User Information Page (Userdisp.aspx vs person.aspx)

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I hope with this post to clarify why in Sharepoint the User Information Page is rendered sometimes with userdisp.aspx and sometimes with person.aspx.

In WSS, when you click on a profile link you are redirected to the User Information Page used by WSS to display WSS profile informations, this page is userdisp.aspx and is located in the same web.

In MOSS (with profile services enabled), instead, when you click on a profile link you are redirected to a different User Information Page, person.aspx. This page is the page showing the public profile of a user and is located under mysite site collection.

Sometimes happens that in MOSS (with profile services enabled), when you click on a profile link you are redirected to userdisp.aspx instead of person.aspx and this page doesn’t permit you to change user profile attributes. I will give you in a moment a reason for this behaviour.

When you are in MOSS and click on a profile link, you are always redirected to userdisp.aspx. This page loads ProfileRedirect control which uses MySiteRedirectionUserControl to redirect to public profile page on mysite. For security reasons, this redirection is made only if the public profile page url is safe.

What does it mean safe? Ok, right question!

The following URLs are considered safe in redirection:

  1. Same host name as the original URL (portal at https://mycompany:80, and my site under https://mycompany:8080).
  2. The URL to be redirected is a Portal URL. That is, if we set Portal site connection (from site actions -> site settings -> Portal site connection) to be
    https://mysite.[hostheader], https://mysite... will then be considered as a safe URL.
  3. Loop back addresses like https://localhost, https://127.0.0.1.

HTH

Dario

Technorati Tag: MOSS